So I saw fdd post something about this somewhere but I can't seem to find it again.
Does anyone have experience with letting the buds cure/dry while the plant is still in the ground? If so, how long did you do it for? How did it affect the high? If i remember right, fdd said it gave him an intense couchlock high.
I was thinking I'd try this on a plant next harvest season. I guess I would just stop watering the plant when it looks ready to harvest and let it sit for 1-2 weeks or until it gets too cold? I want something that'll really knock someone out
It's "vine-ripened" bud. You basically leave the plant out after it has reached it's full flowering potential, and provide it with no more water or nutrients. This is best done in a dry, hot climate though. You wait until the plant turns a golden hue, and then harvest it. It's quite crispy by that time, I imagine, so I'd be careful harvesting it.
I haven't done this in soil, but I've done something like it in an aeroponic setup, though I didn't let it go quite as far as fdd's friend did. I'm not even sure I could have. The bud is effectively cured on the vine, and is indeed quite dry. And yes, every trichome I could see with the naked eye was about as amber as it gets, leading to an intense couchlock high, but it was still pretty cerebral considering. I achieved this by providing only distilled water to the plant for quite some time, and leaving the lights on 12/12. I slowly decreased the amount of water in the reservoir until the plant was receiving only air through the roots. I eventually removed the roots entirely to prevent rot. Let it go for about a month, and... voila. Vine-ripened bud, that's a slight golden-green. You have to be on guard for decay and disease, though. The bud was cured a bit afterward too though, using the traditional air curing method. Potent smell, interesting high. This just sort of started the process of curing while still on the plant- I would strongly suspect that in the presence of light, some of the THC breaks down into other psychoactive (as well as non-psychoative) cannabinoids that change the character of the high. I'm sure many of us have experienced this to some extent, by finding little pieces of bud on the floor left over from a harvest some time afterward, while other plants were still flowering.
Try it in soil if you're growing indoors (or outside, for that matter, though I'd be hesitant to do so if I lived in a wet climate); I'd be interested in the results. I imagine it would be much more dramatic than what I attempted to do.
~Ethno
